The Goodies

The Goodies was a surreal British television comedy series of the 1970s combining sketches and situation comedy and starring Graeme Garden, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Bill Oddie.

Basic plot structure

The series' basic structure revolved the trio offering themselves for hire - with the tagline "We Do Anything, Anytime" (later changed to "Anywhere") - to perform all sorts of ridiculous but benevolent tasks. This pretext allowed the show to explore all sorts of off-the-wall scenarios for comedic potential. Sometimes these were thinly-disguised comments on current events (for example, a show where the South African government gave up on Apartheid and implemented "apart-height", where short people were separated from the rest of society), where others were more abstractly philosophical (where the trio spend Christmas Eve together waiting for the world to be blown up by government edict). This was one of a number of episodes that take place entirely in one room. This was usually because the entire location budget for the season had been spent, forcing the trio to come up with a script that relied entirely on character interaction. These "claustrophobic" episodes often worked surprisingly well.

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